Chapter Text
You go over the checklist in your head, one more time. You like to think of it as channeling Jaehee now, this new coherence with which you manage to organize the things you need. She’s not particularly fussy about anything; it’s just her natural efficiency that makes everything make sense. It helps her deliver the best results, and you want nothing less for her today. So you’ll borrow her methods to give her something back.
The bathroom you are sitting in is warm and humid with the heat of the bath you’ve run. You feel a little trickle of sweat run down your spine as you lean forward from where you’re sitting on the edge of the tub. Your thin tank top sticks to your stomach when you shift. The only sounds you can hear are the sharp drips of water from the spout behind you, the pips of the foamy bathwater deflating with every passing second, and the sound of your hands running over your own legs as you rub them absentmindedly. You’re waiting for another sound, one you’ve come to expect almost like clockwork over these past few weeks with Jaehee.
It is simply a practical living arrangement. With how frequently you were visiting and the quiet gift of another spare key, you just sort of found your own niche here in this quiet, cozy space with her. If she had been surprised even once to open the door to find you waiting for her inside, she never let it show, and eventually the habit integrated itself comfortably into your daily lives. Lately, you’d even been giving her shoulder massages after dinner as a time to chat or let her browse her phone in peace while you gently warmed her up with slow, firm movements of your hands across the back of her neck.
The first couple of times, she had been reluctant to let you do such a thing for her. It was just trouble, she protested, and she took care of her body in plenty of other ways. But you had insisted on letting you try just a couple times, and if she still didn’t like it, you wouldn’t push her to continue. And so she had submitted herself to the focused kneadings of your hands, those smooth, regular movements that found tight knots all up and down her neck and shoulders and gently relaxed them all until it was as though she had melted into your arms with soft sighs of relief. The pleasure it brought her pleased you in turn, and though she may have tried to weakly decline it once after that, it was impossible to deny that you were both enjoying it immensely. You wonder if she misses it on the days that you can’t make it.
Last night, you had finally worked up the nerve to ask her to let you try pampering her a different way. You asked her as she lay in against you on the couch, leaning into you in a slouch while she browsed a few sites, the curve of her back fitted snugly to the front of your body as you put your chin on her shoulder and wrapped your arms around her, your own phone in your hands where they rested on her stomach. You had been so nervous that you ended up whispering the question, feeling that shiver pass through her when your breath tickled the back of her ear. And though you didn’t tell her any of the details, she agreed to let you direct her when she came back from her coffee roasting classes today.
Almost as though she could sense your uncertainty – no, she almost certainly could—she sealed the deal herself with a kiss, a quick peck right next to your mouth with those soft lips from below, twisting around in your lap to reach your face before she twisted back and resumed scrolling on her phone.
And now here you were, breathlessly awaiting her, wondering what she must be thinking of your request. You had prepared some real rose petals, but they made you feel a little silly, so you hadn’t actually sprinkled them anywhere just yet. They were still by the sink, all crumpled tightly together into a ball that attested to how much you had worried at them, rubbing them until your fingertips were pink with their pigment. The water was scented with a fruity bath foam, one of your favorites that wasn’t too sweet, fragrant and floral with undertones of a woody bitterness, diffuse through the room on the cloud of steam you’d built up in the room. Part of you worried that the water might be too hot, or the room too steamed up, but somehow, the deep lungfuls of thick, hazy air felt like the only thing keeping you calm, muffling the worries.
You cast your eyes around elsewhere, re-evaluating the placement of the small tea lights you’d only just in what you hoped were tasteful locations. You’ve cleared away most fire hazards, but in the low lighting with only one of the bathroom lights on, you were sure they would light up the space nicely. You eyed the speakers you’d set up on the counter behind the ball of rose petals. You have a playlist ready, but if you played it now, you might miss the sound of her coming home. So instead, you kneel by the foot of her surprisingly large bathtub and fuss with the basket of goods you’d bought a few days ago to prepare for this. There’s a fluffy soft loofah you squish appreciatively, and a whole range of scented goods with so many applications you’re not entirely confident that you can keep their intended purposes straight.
The size of the bath is certainly atypical, but it’s been a pleasant surprise all around. Somehow, that’s what you would have expected of an apartment designed by the type of people who were at the head of C&R International. You make to stand and hear behind your own rustling sounds the telltale metallic click of the front door popping out from its frame after a full day of staying shut and the sounds of Jaehee’s footsteps as she steps into her own apartment.
“I’m home!” She calls out, and a reverberating thump tells you she let the door close behind her. You hear the shlick of the lock closing and the sound of her slippers slapping on those wood floors you know so well now when she comes in past the front, looking for you. “Hello?”
“I’m in the bathroom,” you call out in a warbling voice. God, your heart is doing somersaults right now, so your throat decided to betray you too. There’s no response, like she didn’t hear. Deep breath. Nothing to be so scared of. You try again.
“Jaehee? I’m in the bathroom,” you shout, startling yourself with how loud you are in this tiny insulated space. The echoes are still making your head spin when you hear a soft knock.
“Hello. Did you still want… to show me something? Are you…?” You hear her ask from outside. You can practically hear the way she bites her lower lip in the pause.
“Why don’t you take off your jacket,” you suggest, crossing the bathroom floor and cracking open the door. The room outside is brightly lit with fluorescent lights and the difference in brightness makes you blink. When your eyes adjust, you see Jaehee looking at you in mild bemusement, a little color to her cheeks as she gives you a brief one-over, trying to find a tell on your plans as you crack a crooked little smile and beckon her forward.
She finally moves, shrugging off the new jacket you’d picked for her just last week and folding it in half before leaving it on the bed outside. She pauses for a moment and tilts her head while holding eye contact – an unspoken question. You feel a little heat rise when she hooks a finger under her collar, tugging it, but you manage to tease back, “You could leave a few other things outside, too, if you’d like.”
“Should I be leaving them there?” Jaehee says, raising one of those delicate eyebrows of hers. Her voice is absolutely teasing you, and you want to rush out and just take her in your arms and plaster her face with a barrage of kisses and hear her protest jokingly– but the time for that is another day. You only give her a cheerful, “Yes, ma’am” and duck back in, leaving the bathroom door open a tiny bit for her.
Opening the door has already let out some of the steam from inside, and now it feels more breathable in here. It’s just as well, you think, that you hadn’t actually accidentally suffocated her inside a makeshift sauna. But with her return and your flustered state, you’ve kind of forgotten what order things were supposed to happen in. Damn. You’re going to write the list down next time, and maybe in the steam on the mirrors. You can’t even check how you look because every reflective surface has been fogged up in here, and before you can wipe even a pipe off to check yourself, she comes in.
When Jaehee goes in for barista training, she usually wears the uniform typical of the trainees of those passionate roasters you met at the RFA party. Usually, she comes home in the uniform as well, and it’s actually become more familiar a sight than the business suits she leaves untouched in her closet these days. When she enters, you see that she has actually undone her button down shirt, letting it hang open in front as she slides in through the smallest possible crack of the door she can squeeze through. You can see her navel even from across the space.
“Come in,” you prompt in a soft voice, leading the way to the bathtub. “I want to help you relax today, and just let you have a good time.” All the elegant words you’d prepared just evaporated with the steam that left the room, and you feel left with nothing but the heart of the matter. Jaehee still seems plenty satisfied with that and follows you in, closing that door behind her as well.
“Did you buy this all for me?” she asks softly, spinning slowly as she walks to take in the sight of every corner. Now you’re standing together by the edge of the tub, face to face and close together, close enough for you to smell the sour bitterness of coffee grounds on her and a faint whiff of the salt of sweat, almost close enough for you to bury your face in the crook of her neck and hug her close to you without even reaching out. Your chest aches for how hard you know she is working to get her qualifications as soon as possible. She deserves this, and you wish it could be perfect.
“Of course,” the words come. You’re not even sure you’re the one saying them. You’re lost in the gentle look she’s giving you, questions and hesitation in one facial expression. “Won’t you let me treat you, Jaehee?”
“Just this once,” is her response, in a tone that lets you know she doesn’t mean that, that she needs to say that because she doesn’t think she deserves it. She’s wrong, and you know it. And she knows that you know and don’t care that she’s wrong, and so she doesn’t say anything when you slide your arms around her waist inside her shirt or when you bring them trailing up her body until they reach her shoulders. She lets you help her remove her shirt, turns around and touches her own shoulder softly, demurely when you undo the clasp of her bra. She folds up her arms and lets you take them to the counter, doesn’t tell you to fold them when you drape them over the edge of the sink.
She slips off her skirt herself, and her underwear, leaning into you for balance. She tosses them lightly to the sink, holding onto your arm rather tightly with the other hand. She is warm to the touch in her palm and she lets you lead her to the tub. You barely notice her nakedness; it is secondary to the fire in her touch.
She tests the water first, dipping her fingers into the mountains of foam and swishing them around beneath the surface, letting the swirling sparkles inside the water that you prepared glisten and dance inside the cool, porcelain basin. You wait patiently for her to take the first step in herself, and let her brace herself against you as she slowly slips one foot in, and then the other.
“It’s a bit hot,” she murmurs, but only after both her feet are in. You begin to apologize, but she hushes you with a little pat and slides all the way in herself, holding onto the edges of the tub and sinking in a little sigh. She makes barely a splash as she enters, even though she’s submerged herself all the way up to her chin and you find yourself just watching the edges of her hair floating on the water and caught on the bubbles before you catch yourself staring.
You pull up a small stool and pull over the basket of goods, but as you bring up the loofah, she reaches out of the tub and stops your hand.
“What are you doing?” It’s asked in such a matter-of-fact way that you’re not really sure how to respond. It’s like she thinks you know the answer, and you think you do, but somehow that answer is wrong.
“I’m going to pamper you,” you stammer rather unconvincingly. Water and foam drips onto your foot off of her arm hanging out of the tub, holding your hand back. This wasn’t planned for.
“From outside?”
It takes you a moment. It was probably the way she flushed even in the low yellow lighting that that helped you figure out what she meant, or the way she looks right at you when your eyes widen, and definitely the little laugh she gives when you mouth “oh” under your breath. She waves her hand in a “go on” sort of motion and waves off your nonverbal protests that take the form of further silly faces and wiggly hand gestures until you finally concede your defeat.
So you find yourself stripping off the light layers of clothes you’d worn in preparation to get soaked in, and leaving them dry in the space next to her clothes. The breeze that dropping your top onto the counter makes blows all the rose petals off and they tickle your legs as you practically stumble over to the tub. Your skin runs cool, even though the bathroom is just about as warm as it was earlier. Jaehee is sitting forward, her legs crossed beneath her under the water, making a space for you behind her.
After you pull the stool closer to the tub and rest the basket of goods on top of it, within easy reach, you pause for a millisecond. But Jaehee has been waiting for you, and now she invites you forward, extending a hand. There’s not a moment for self-consciousness because you feel as natural slipping into the hot water as she does against you, sitting between your legs after some splashing adjustments in the tub, body to body, skin to skin, unspeakably soft and warm and right up against you, pressing into you with the all force of an insistent cuddle. There is just enough space for the two of you this way underneath the bubbles.
Now that you’re here, she lets go of a surprising amount of tension. If you weren’t holding her hands beneath the water, you think she could just slip away, fluid and intangible with the release of a day’s burden. You take the time to just breathe in, leaning back, too, letting her rest her head against your collarbone as you bask in the enveloping warmth of the water. Gentle fumes from the bath salts fill your nostrils, soothing but almost achingly floral against her scent, an earthy sort of smell that you can only get right against your skin, like you are now as you press your nose into the back of her neck and inhale while you wrap your arms around her from behind in a clumsy, warm and slippery hug.
“Mm,” you hum on the exhale.
“Do I smell good?” She rests her hands on top of yours where they rest on her stomach, pressing lightly on the warm skin there.
“Wonderful. Better than the bath. I should have made it Jaehee-scented,” you tease, your mouth right by her ear. She gives a little shiver again, in spite of the hot embrace of the water around you two and you feel a fierce gladness burn in you.
You clench your hands a little, applying pressure as you run your hands up the planes of her stomach and pull her into you, feeling the way her back arches and her legs tense as she extends her toes to brace her feet against the far wall of the tub. Her grip tightens on the backs of your hands, holding you, holding her. When your parted lips meet, the placement is perfect, a blissful moment of synchronized movement that rewards you with a warm feeling that floods down from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. You kiss her softly again and again, receiving as you take, relishing the faint “mm”s she makes in between breaths. The water lapping quietly against the walls of the tub as she shifts back and forth in your arms sounds like distant applause.
You notice now that your skin is pleasantly tingling with the heat of the bath and of Jaehee against you. You feel a tug deep in your gut that steals away your voice, an overwhelming wave of affection and happiness that just washes away all your other thoughts. It’s like this bathroom is all that will, has, or does exist – this time with her that crushes you with love, an immeasurable weight of it that you’re aware of on all sides, like it’s a tangible substance and the atmosphere in this room is thick with it. You want to indulge in it, you want to know that she wants it too, and you want to hear her and feel her, breathe her and see her in everything you do.
Instead, you sit up straighter from where you’re slouched beneath her, startling her by pushing up slightly when you raise your hips and slide them back. Your reach is longer this way and you snag a smooth, cold plastic bottle of body wash from the basket by the tub. It’s a mild lavender stress relief mix, as the label says when you turn it over in front of you to read it in a position where she can see it too. Then you pop the lid open with your thumb, and taking her left hand gently in yours, raise her arm up above the surface of the bubbles from behind, holding your arm parallel and beneath hers. She lets it rest on yours, but you know how it might feel if she tensed it, dense muscle underneath soft layers, a hidden strength that most would envy.
You turn the bottle over and let it drizzle out a translucent purplish trail down her arm, from her deltoid to her bicep, down the length of her forearm. It spins and leaves little whorls and patterns there, the world’s dizziest snake on the world’s most beautiful woman. You set the bottle aside and splash a little water up onto her arm before you begin to massage it in. You reach across in front of Jaehee, your arms holding her in as you lather it up on her skin in broad movements. Your palms fill with suds while the slick sounds of your stroking echo in the bathroom. She raises her arm slightly, turns her body to the side so that you can reach around better, and laughs while nearly elbowing you in the face when you tickle her under her arm suddenly.
“Don’t!” she scolds, sounding far too cheerful to be serious. “I will not hesitate to strike if you force my hand.”
Since she wasn’t serious, you do it again when you repeat these motions with her other arm, and she does actually elbow you right in the ribs where it hurts a lot more than you’re willing to wheezily admit when she asks guiltily if she overdid it.
By the time you’re soaping up her shoulders and neck, she’s taken over the conversation, telling you about the people she met at the roaster’s today. You listen with three-fourths of a mind, the other fourth focused on using this time to rub the knots out from between her shoulders today. It’s harder when your hands are so slick they slide right off her skin, so you take on the new task of scooping water up to rinse her skin off. She moves her hair to one side to help as you do so.
Her hair really has grown these past months. It easily reaches her shoulders now, these chestnut waves. You remember when you helped dye it to this chestnut brown after one whimsical night and some poorly made decisions led to her hair taking on some hues very unlike those on the box from the store. You wonder how you could measure its length. Easily in the centimeters since the first time you touched it. But if you’re looking for accuracy, you can count it one night at a time, each meal shared, every hand held, and every breathless kiss. Tiny pieces, a bigger picture, locks of brown hair dampened by a bubble bath. You press your nose to the middle of her shoulders, just resting your head there for a little. She reaches back and finds your hand underneath the water, and you just listen to her talk. It helps her, too, vocalizing all her thoughts and turn them into linear conversation. Sometimes you take notes for her, call yourself her assistant. Jaehee takes it as dark humor.
Her shoulders and arms are done now, and you ask her in a moment between sentences for her to turn around. She scoots forward across the tub and half raises herself out, then slides down the other side of the tub back into the water. She’s in the thick of the bubbles, almost out of sight behind them, so you stick your open hand in the water and playfully fling it right at her.
Ideally, this would have cleared the bubbles somewhat and been a playful splash, but you've overdone it and smack her in the face with a wall of water. She barely has time to give a strangled yelp before the soapy spray gets her right in the eyes and mouth. Now blinded, the wounded Jaehee retaliates blindly, flinging mostly bubbles back at you ineffectively as you laugh hysterically behind the hands you’ve clapped to your mouth.
She ignores your insincere “I’m sorry”s and you can feel her feet trying to kick at you, though they slide right off your sides and thighs. You grab her ankle and give it a small tug, and with a little gurgle of dismay, she suddenly slips in under the water up to her mouth. She finds purchase now on your stomach and shoves off not gently, her big toe digging into your navel mercilessly. She shoots back up into sight, lips pressed together thinly and trying to glower, but God, the two of you can’t help yourselves and burst out laughing, feeling the water between you ripple with the motion of your bodies.
“Whatever did I do?” she laments melodramatically when she can compose herself enough to stop coughing on laughter and quite possibly some of the bathwater. You still have your hand around one of her ankles and lift it—slowly, so as not to pull her in again—straight out of the water, resting her heel on the outer edge of the tub. You keep your eyes on her the whole time, holding it steady and watching the flush on her face deepen slightly when you let go. You can see the muscle in her thigh flex slightly as she holds her foot up where you leave it, pointing the toes slightly, watch her slide in behind the bubbles again to hide her face from your direct gaze.
“What haven’t you done?” you respond, voice soft to keep your words from coming across the wrong way. “You don’t have to do everything yourself. Not for yourself, not for me. I want you to rest, Jaehee.” You brush the bottom of her foot with the back of your hand, reach out and find the body wash again. Her face is red, with heat from the bath and the way you’ve opened her legs here, and perhaps also the feeling of the cold drip of the thick body wash as you draw lines on the exposed parts of her leg outside of the water.
You run your hand up and down her leg from her knee to her foot in even motions, a circular rhythm as you caress the roundness of her calves and bring the stroke up the hard plane of her shin, cupping her heel on the way back up to her knee. You feel her foot tense and relax rapidly in your hand like she’s not sure if or how to hold it, can feel the palpable way the room is quiet now beating down on your back.
When her leg is white with fine foamy bath wash, you lower it back in, guiding her leg’s descent into the water. You submerge it again, watching the foam come off in a halo of suds around her leg. You move forward, sliding yourself into the space between her legs, slowly drawing your lightest touch up the full length from the sole of her foot to a spot halfway up her thigh. You’re nestled against her now, sitting and partly kneeling between her thighs. You feel them resting on top of your thighs, press down on the muscle with your hand and feel the softness there. Your other hand finds its way to her other thigh, leads the way as it swims further underwater, following the bend of her leg back to where it meets her hips, pulling you forward in a slow, unstoppable approach. You close the last of the distance between the two of you along this arc, kiss her softly on the lips as she closes her eyes just before it happens.
She still tastes like heaven.
“You haven’t done my other leg,” she mumbles right against your mouth. You draw your face back half an inch, but don’t budge from where you’ve nestled your hips against beneath the water.
“You’ll have to tell me how much it’ll bother you before we decide what to do about that.”
“I’m sure I’ll live,” she replies after a moment of thought. “You can do it for me later.”
She kisses your chin, just beneath your mouth. Her hands are up, touching your cheeks and pulling you forward again. She slides them back into your hair and pulls gently on the back of your neck.
“Does it count as resting if I feel like I could never sleep again?” she asks breathlessly, her eyes gleaming bright. You definitely put those candles in the right places.
“I’m not really sure,” you admit. You kiss her again, tugging on her lower lip with your teeth before letting go and pressing your forehead into hers. “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”
“Mm. I’ll want,” she manages to get in between two quicker hungry kisses, “the report on my desk in the morning.”
“I can have it ready for you now,” you say, wondering if you’re going to be actually able to pull off the idea that just came into mind. You tug at her thighs, pulling her until she’s seated on your kneeling lap. “If you’ll come with me, Ms. Kang.”
“Who’s ‘Ms. Kang’? And what are you doing?” she grumbles good-naturedly into the side of your neck, which she is inspecting at the moment with her mouth. She seems to have the idea of it, though, and hooks her feet together behind your back without prompting. You thread your fingers of your hands together and prepare your stance, putting your feet at shoulder’s width to the best of your ability and leaning forward. In one huge effort, you stand, hooking her hips with your hands and pulling her into you, hard, trying to raise her out of the bath without looking like you’re trying too hard.
Of course, it goes disastrously, and she slides off of you before you’re even standing up. Now you’re both stumbling and feeling like the tub could not be any smaller as the water splashes frenetically and you both yell and grab the wall and each other for balance. Jaehee finally falls back, hitting the edge of the tub hard but with her hand behind her to cushion the blow to her bare ass and clutches it desperately to stay up without sliding in again. You stare at each other breathlessly across the way.
“Ow. I don’t think that was a good idea,” she says redundantly.
“Do I get a second chance?” you grin back, trying not to look so pleased with how that went. You throw one foot over the edge of the bathtub and make sure you’re actually standing on the mat as you reach out with one hand towards her.
She takes your proffered hand, but rises without any actual help from you. “I can consider an extension, but you may have to convince me you deserve it.”
“I thought I already did that.”
“That was a different assignment.”
She follows you out of the tub and takes the fluffy towels you offer her. Instead of drying yourself off, you find a makeup wipe. It’s cold in your hand, as cold as the rest of you feels dripping onto her (her!) bathroom floor. She takes a look at herself in the mirror and smiles, guiding your hand to the worst of the art you’ve made on her face. You clean with short, firm movements, getting the worst of it off where it’s run and using the time to look over every part of her face. You know you could wake up to this face every day for the rest of your life, you know it in the happiness that hurts in your throat when you think about it and see her here in your hands.
When you finish, she throws it out for you, and surprises you by coming back up with a hand full of rose petals. She blows them out of her hand into your face. Few of them fly that far. One of them sticks to your chest against the water still clinging there.
“Why didn’t you use these in the tub? They’re lovely.”
You can’t quite bring yourself to tell her the real embarrassing answer, so you deflect the question by presenting her with the new bathrobe you’d bought for this very moment. “Try it on.”
She lets you put it on her and tie it around her waist. She checks herself in the mirror again, turning side to side and twirling it out. Her appreciation is written in the cheerful expression she wears, and you know she is thanking you. The bright periwinkle color you’d been uncertain of works wonderfully in the dim, yellow saturated lighting of the room. It’s just such a shame she’ll have to take it off again soon.
“Thank you,” she says, turning to face you, her hips turning a millisecond after her shoulders to give the hem of the robe a swish. Must be fun. “I really mean it. Thank you.”
“You have nothing, nothing to thank me for,” you reply with force, pulling on your own bathrobe. “This was the least that I could give you. You deserve so much, you know that?” You reach out and hug her, pulling her right into you. She turns her head so that the side of her face rests against you and returns the hug at your waist. You lean into each other as she mulls this over. You can almost hear the gears turning in her head. She struggles not to deny that, even though you know it’s her instinctual response to the idea. You’ve told her a million times over not to think that way, but it’s not something easily changed.
“You really do. You work so hard, you think of everyone but yourself first. You don’t even have to worry about the all results, because that’s not what you should care about.”
Her voice is small. “But, what if—?”
“No.” You don’t let her finish that question. “No, Jaehee. It’s not about the results. It’s you, your happiness, remember? So let me take care of you, too, okay? You don’t have to put yourself second here. You come first now, for both of us.”
She doesn’t answer, just squeezes her arms tighter and tighter as her answer instead. You’re fond of the gesture at first, but it doesn’t stop at the threshold of comfortable, and she’s still squeezing you tighter yet.
“I might still need to breathe, though,” you manage in a strained voice. You feel like your ears could pop right off your head. Her grip relaxes and she turns her head to rest the other side of her face on you.
“Thank you,” she says again, so softly you can barely hear it. Does she sound embarrassed? You’re smiling again as you pat her head against you.
“You said that already,” you point out cheekily, and grunt when she playfully punches you in the stomach.
“You know what I mean,” she huffs.
Yeah, you do.